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Friday, June 28, 2013

We in the global and historical apex of human society, the planetary engine toward democracy, teach our children well that the US values such things. As American children, and into our American adult years, we are saturated in the rhetoric proclaiming all these things.

We are also taught that our enemies make similar claims but none of their claims are based in reality. Proof of that is easy; their citizens flee from them to us. Every schoolchild in the US knows this. They also know that the US must be forced to go to war only because other aggressors eventually make us do so. That is easy to prove because of instances that anchor that fundamental truth, such as Pearl Harbor.

Then, as adults, we begin to be exposed to other facts that do not fit comfortably into our received master narrative, facts that violate the common wisdom and culturally certain knowledge. This can produce many responses.

There are some who flip completely because living with a dichotomous typology--one side good, one side bad--is simplest. There are ready-made philosophies and structural explanations that sit on our ideological shelves. Islam is divinely mandated. Communism is perfection. US bad, socialism good. These are folks who need a received scaffolding that explains everything in one Manichean paragraph. The theology or ideology has primary or holy texts, to be read literally and interpreted by masters, not individuals. Any behavior committed in the name of that single explanation is excused and contextualized in that frame. Women have fewer rights because it is written in the Bible and the Quran. Violence is required because Marx, Lenin, the Founding Fathers/American Revolution, St. Augustine, St. Thomas Aquinas, the Baghvagita, the Old Testament, and the Quran all justify it.

Then there are those to whom critical thinking either comes naturally or who have been taught to use it by family, teachers, or other mentors. Most of us believe we engage in assessments and decisions like that, weighing all the facts and evaluating the options before making decisions. Most of us believe we are immune to uncritical acceptance of some master narrative.

But at some level we know better. Propagandists and other persuaders certainly understand our weaknesses and exploit them. It is insidious but pervasive. One recent example is the notion that all the violations of our privacy are Just Fine because this is how our government protects us. We hear the persuaders telling us that our rights are all fine but lucky thing for our government intelligence services, since they have stopped so many terror attacks in the past few years. What value are all those rights if the terrorists blow up your family? Be grateful, subjects. Resistance is not only useless, it is unpatriotic, even treasonous.

It worked for Lenin, Stalin, and all their successors and functionaries in the Soviet Union. Privacy was unpatriotic. Same for Hitler, Goebbels, and the rest of the Nazis--and their successors in East Germany and the rest of the Warsaw Pact. China has shown the unpatriotic evils in many who sought to gain even the slightest human or civil rights, all the way from Mao onward. In the US, it was how we came to the McCarthy Era, and how Nixon went about his business. In our Homeland, the military and intelligence services demand, in the name of national interest, to know everything about everybody. Anything less is siding with the terrorists, anything less is evil. Challenging this Orwellian hegemony of the state, questioning and revealing the practices of Big Brother, is siding with The Enemy.

So what about all the claims that, without the Patriot Act, without PRISM, without the NSA and FBI and CIA information-gathering we would fall victim to the terrorists because these patriotic defenders have stopped so many attacks already?

Really? Are these attacks like the one here locally, in Portland, Oregon, in which a child of 17 expressed some violent ideation when he learned of US drone attacks on his birthplace, Somalia? The US intelligence services were actually notified of this by the boy's father--perhaps they had known from other sources as well--and they swung into action, helping to radicalize the boy, and, after he turned 18, provided the 'man' with a fake bomb. The only radical Muslim in the entire terrorist operation was the young fellow himself--all the rest were agents. This is the sort of case from which we were protected.

And even that level of 'protection' that results in conviction is exceedingly rare. To this aspirant critical thinker, all such claims by our officials must be dismissed as pure propaganda to justify their rampant, wholesale, illegal violations of our Bill of Rights, the UN Charter, and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, unless they show enough evidence to have resulted in a conviction in our US courts, and even then, one must wonder about those cases if they are anything like the Portland fiasco.

So yes, we have many great rights in the US, and I'm taking advantage of them right now. Of course, for the mere exercise of those rights, my 100 percent nonviolent, anti-militarist criminal career has landed me in many jails and three prisons. so please pardon me if I'm convinced that Daniel Ellsberg, Julian Assange, Bradley Manning, Edward Snowden and others should be thanked, not arrested. And when John Kerry and Barack Obama say that Snowden should be extradited to the US because the US routinely does that for Russia, I say well let's stop doing that for Russia, a place where dissidents flee successfully or may be radioactively poisoned, fed dioxin, or gunned down in their own homes, all fates of Russian dissidents. There should be no extradition to such places. Time to start shaking up those master frames and narratives. Ethically, they are flimsy.

Thursday, June 27, 2013

When we win, we win, right? End of story. Dictator toppled. Civil rights affirmed. Nuclear power plant stopped. Bike lane painted. Pipeline will never be built. Work contract signed. Time to party and start a life of horseshoes and long vacations.

Conflict forensics researchers Louis Kriesberg and Bruce Dayton (2012, pp. 284-285) say no, the agreement is just one step toward sustainable victory. Indeed, they note, there are six general categories of directions and forces that may follow 'the' result, the 'final resolution.'

One, the resolution or agreement may hold, but may only be one of many sub-conflicts in a wider and deeper systemic conflict among all the stakeholders. So, for example, a dictator may be deposed, but another conflict erupts over the same policing practices still be executed by the next government. Hello, Egypt.

Two, the agreement is a steppingstone to the next negotiation, the next subconflict. For example, an imprisoned oppositional leader may be released, paving the way toward the next round of talks about one person, one vote. That was what happened in South Africa.

Three, some parties not necessarily invited to the original talks that led to the original accord may spoil the agreement by extremely destructive action. This is what happened to the Oslo Process between Israel and Palestine; moderate Israelis and moderate Palestinian Liberation Organization leaders never invited either Israeli settlers nor Hamas--the more difficult radicals on each side--but chose to negotiate a successful peace accord in 1995 that was met with much jubilation for a minute, and then suicide bombers and an assassin by Hamas and a rightwing Israeli, respectively. The process began to unwind and eventually Ariel Sharon finished it entirely with his provocative visit to the the al-Aqsa mosque/Temple Mount on 28 September 2000, triggering the Second Intifada.

Four, all parties make an agreement that is almost immediately broken. This is often because the parties are pressured externally to sign something and do so to satisfy the external party, often a sponsor of some sort, frequently with money and arms, but the parties have no real intention of honoring the agreement. Think Somalia.

Five, the agreement emboldens one or more parties to view any gain as an invitation to escalate in order to solidify and enhance gains. When the Tea Party won significant gains in the 2010 mid-term elections they essentially hijacked the Republican party and imposed their jingoism, xenophobia, and misogynistic views on the receptive party leadership, turning the sequence into more destruction and backfiring on the Rs.

Six, a power-over resolution is reached in a power-over fashion and all others go into passive mode until they can become aggressive again. Anytime you get that outcome it is only a matter of time until the conflict re-emerges, sometimes hotter than ever. From the Peloponnesian War/Athenian genocidal invasion of the Isle of Melos in 416 BC, to the Treaty of Versailles/Nazis, those are harsh lessons.

For a nonviolent campaign to truly succeed (and when it does, it is much less likely to fall prey to the worst of these pitfalls, since it doesn't wage conflict destructively) it must carry on its work long after the victory or that victory will be quite temporary. This argues in some ways for a strong cultural connectivity on the one hand--keeping all networks in order--and professionalization on the other--those who give and give and give toward the agreement need to be replaced by those who make it their career to keep the agreement sustainable and healthy.

So win, party, play some horseshoes, and take a long vacation, but come back to continue the work for peace, environmental protection, and justice for all. It's a life, not a single campaign. The long haul is the only real stable path.

Wednesday, June 26, 2013

My son is African American. So is my stepson. The youngest was born exactly 15 years to the day from Rosa Parks' act of sitting down on the bus and the oldest was born in the late summer when the Civil Rights movement was losing activists to the extreme terrorist violence of southern white racists.

The bus boycott and eventual victory after a year of struggle in Montgomery, Alabama, marked the beginning of the modern Civil Rights movement, launched December 1, 1955 by Parks and subsequently led by Martin Luther King, Jr. Freedom Summer of 1964 was the struggle focused primarily in Mississippi, but also elsewhere in the former slave states, where black and white activists alike were killed seeking something guaranteed by the 15th Amendment, the right to vote without regard to race. Did James Chaney--a young black kid from Meridian, Mississippi--Andrew Goodman and Michael "Micky" Schwerner--two young Jewish kids from New York city--did they and other murdered civil rights workers die in vain?

The John Roberts-led Supreme Court has now virtually vacated the 15th Amendment by essentially overturning the Voting Rights Act of 1965, saying that statistics on who now votes makes it irrelevant. Never mind that the second provision of the 15th Amendment gives Congress that power to enforce and Congress renewed the Voting Rights Act in 2006, overwhelmingly. John "We Don't Need No Stinkin' 15th Amendment" Roberts has ruled.

Really? Think Florida, 2000, when a concerted effort to keep African Americans from voting through dirty tricks reminiscent of the nasty Southern strategies of long questionnaires and intimidation produced a contaminated outcome. Of course, the Supremes intervened in that contest too, giving the election to Bush despite clear evidence of widespread violation of the Voting Rights Act and the 15th Amendment. If the Voting Rights Act of 1965 would have been invoked and upheld, we would not have invaded Iraq and many Iraqis and Americans would still be alive today--and our economy would be much stronger.

Well then, if we are all about gutting Constitutional amendments, if they aren't so sacrosanct after all, how about that Second? I mean, with the Roberts Court effectively quashing the 15th, with NSA romping all over the Fourth, can't we just make a move on the Second? Can't we get rid of a few million handguns? These amendments are up for evisceration--let's do it! Neither of my sons owns a gun and I certainly don't. We are more free, I argue, as a result, and everyone's freedom would be greater if we could be free from guns, so abolish the outdated Stupid Second.

Tuesday, June 25, 2013

Why is it so easy for the military to get young people to join when they know that they can do any other job with less risk of killing an innocent child or dying themselves?
The military has all the money.

Why is it so easy for the military to get Congress to vote for massive amounts of funding to the Pentagon?
The military has all the money.

Why is it so easy for the military to convince everyone that they are more important to fund and fund and fund and fund than education, environmental protection, housing, or jobs?
The military has all the money.

Why is it so easy for the military to find journalists favorable to them?
Well, why do you think?

But threaten to slow the rate of increase to the military funding or impose an across-the-board freeze on all government spending--the sequester--and who shrieks most shrilly?
The military.

I'm never surprised when (finally! thankfully!) soon-to-retire NPR Talk of the Nation host Neal Conan invites the military to come on the air yet again. And again. And again. He has lost track of how many times many of his favorite officers sit comfortably in Conan's studio chairs, knowing they will not get one single tough question, knowing that Conan will trip all over himself to show off his knowledge of military arcana, knowing that his fawning sycophantic prompts will allow them to regale us all with sea stories or har-har military humor. His deferential obeisance opens the bully pulpit of the NPR microphone to military tirades demanding more more more from Americans, or else, and Neal never misses a beat, nor an opportunity to invite them back in case we the public are not whipping into support formation fast enough for the men with all the guns and money.

So he did it again yesterday, Monday, June 24, 2013. "Good to be back" was the common greeting from the military and military institute guests. One in particular, John Nagl, non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security, was the political hitman. He railed on and on at every opportunity about the dangers and sure deaths because of the sequester. An example:

"I really want to take this opportunity to let the American people
know that if their armed forces are called upon right now, they will be
less ready than they should be. They will lose more of
America's sons and daughters than they need to because we have grounded
fighter squadrons and we have turned off National Training Center
rotations for our Army because of the sequester. And this is a crime
against the armed forces of the United States of America. And I'm here
in Washington. We're on North Capital. We're right next door to Capitol
Hill where those decisions were made. Those need to be overturned."

Really? Nagl was set up to return to this theme, to harp on the poormouth status of the most highly funded military the world has ever seen, bar none, Nagl actually claimed at one point, "Americans veterans are going to die because of the sequester." No, Mr. Nagl, they have been dying all along when they are stupidly sent into combat based on a pack of lies. They die because no one on the entire planet now or ever has liked foreign troops occupying their land. Americans are going to die because they are not covered even by Obamacare. Americans are going to die because their bridges are falling into rivers. Americans are going to die because environmental protection is vastly underfunded. If the military can't make do with the lion's share of the discretionary spending, um, wow.

Conan is like Bill O'ReillyLite. If he has ever invited a peace intellectual on his program, I'm not aware of it, and if he ever did, I'm sure it was a one-shot deal and the interview would have been peppered with tough questions. Conan knows how to do that, but never does to military mouthpieces.

In the end, the liberal militarists are actually more effective imperialists than the conservatives. The liberal imperialists want more classes of people in the military, more of the best and brightest, so they favor women and gays, while the conservatives harumph and say, well, waddya expect when you allow women in? Of course we rape! Liberals see that is not adaptive and try to work around the 26,000 sexual assaults by condemning them and calling for more training and accountability.

We do need more training. We need massive resources diverted from the divisions of tanks and fleets of warships and flights of missles. We need training in intercultural communication, conflict de-escalation, nonviolent interposition, and mass nonviolent mobilization. We need smart sanctions that only affect badly behaving elites and we need millions of jobs that pay people to learn these skills, learn foreign languages, and teach them how to build a sustainable future.

As Bucky Fuller framed it so long ago, we are headed for utopia or oblivion. At least I can personally be satisfied that Neal Conan is headed off the air next month. I only hope the next host of such a program can start to interview the people who can lead us down a far better path than endless war, people like Kathy Kelly, Laura Finley, Medea Benjamin, Erica Chenoweth, Maria Stephan, Cynthia Boaz, Stephen Zunes, Hardy Merriman, Jack DuVall, and so forth. Those people are available, NPR. They solve problems without threatening to blow up anyone's home or kill their children. Time to shift our focus, to listen to some voices who have just as much experience, but doing conflict in a constructive way. Let's hit the refresh icon, NPR. Leave Conan and his guests in rocking chairs and find some folks who can think outside the 'bang-you're-dead' box.

Monday, June 24, 2013

Love is something if you give it away,
Give it away, give it away.
Love is something if you give it away,
You end up having more. It's just like a magic penny,
Hold it tight and you won't have any.
Lend it, spend it, and you'll have so many
They'll roll all over the floor.
--Malvina Reynolds circa 1949

How do conflict forensics relate to Malvina Reynolds and her magic penny? In truth, very directly and very consistently. When a conflict is managed without the love, respect, and regard for the emotions and well being of the enemy/adversary/opponent, the likely outcome will be destructive and the likelihood of re-emergence of conflict again radically rises.

Louis Kriesberg and Bruce Dayton at Syracuse University have written the 4th edition of a once-skinnier volume, Constructive conflicts: From escalation to resolution, a book I taught from on back when the first edition was published in the previous millennium. Lou Kriesberg is emeritus now, and has a co-author now, but he just continues to keep me and my students informed and engaged in the sociology of group-to-group conflict transformation.

How can we finally settle social conflict so that it stays settled? Kriesberg and Dayton advise us to be sure that the settlement is generous, forgiving, and leaves all parties with at least some of their original goals met. "Conflict outcomes," they write, "are constructive insofar as the parties regard them as mutually acceptable" (p. 22).

Sometimes giving away what you are not required to relinquish, even to an opponent you've generally beaten--especially to an opponent you've generally beaten--is how you win even bigger because you remove the burning desire for revenge, or at least dampen it, lessen the intensity, and reduce the numbers of those devoted to vengeance. If you give it away, you end up having more.

Malvina Reynolds was both a product of her time and far ahead of her time. She wrote simple little songs (Little Boxes, It Isn't Nice, What Have They Done to the Rain?, etc.) with profound meaning. Born in 1900, she was denied a high school diploma because her parents opposed World War I, so she just earned three university degrees instead, finishing her Ph.D. in 1938 in Romance Philology. How simplistic. She turned that high school defeat into victory and gave us all something to sing about for the rest of her 77 years on Earth. Thank you, Lou and Malvina.reference

Sunday, June 23, 2013

In his early writings, Gene Sharp recommends creating a strong movement identity, and fortifying it with colors and symbols. What he doesn't address so much is how those symbols will contribute to a movement's diminution if they are chosen poorly. The Anonymous mask is just such a symbol.

It so perfect that many of the masks--based on the movie 'V' that made a fair bundle of profits for Warner Brothers--are sold to corporate-hating demonstrators whose purchase sends further profits to that corporation. It's even more perfect that those who wear the masks to foil the police and intelligence services and to thus avoid being arrested, identified, or targeted in any way, brand the movement as scary, violent, and terrorist, thus tending to reduce recruitment into the movement from amongst the mass ranks even as the movement thus attracts more adrenaline junkies who come to confront cops rather than address specific issues. It is refreshing to see some stirrings in Anonymous to fix some of this:

We are all aware that the movie 'V' is based loosely on a Guy Fawkes-sort of character, someone who blows up government buildings as Fawkes meant to do in 1604, at age 34, in the 'Gunpowder Plot' that was unmasked, got Fawkes arrested, convicted, hanged, drawn, and quartered. Only in Hollywood, of course, do the infantile male fantasies like this succeed. There we get to see lots of explosions, clearly meant to provide a juvenile catharsis for impotent young male viewers. Those explosions don't produce severed limbs on innocent children in their fictionalized perfection, just a wondrous blast in the name of freedom. It's such great irony that Fawkes was just the gunpowder guy in the plot of a small group of Catholic terrorists who only really wanted to kill off the protestant king, with hopes of the unlikely ascension of the child, Princess Elizabeth, to the throne.

Yikes. This is the character upon which the Anonymous strand of many movements is based? Well, no wonder they love threaten and attack, even if only as hacktivists living in their teenboy virtual world. Anonymous populates the YouTube site with video threats that simplistically set up others as 100 percent evil and therefore as legitimate and doomed targets of Anonymous attack. They usually boast that they will defeat opponents, from Obama to the Tea Party to the bloody ruler of Turkey. Really? "We do not forgive. We do not forget. Expect us." The omniscient assurances of certain victory over any and all opponents might appeal to a 'man' stuck in his development at age 12, but that persona will not build mass resistance; it will undermine it.

It's just a wee bit surreal to watch and listen as hackivists hiding behind masks, never giving their names, call for transparency and condemn hypocrisy. Seriously?

The Prime Directive in movements, the filter through which every decision should be made, is, "How will this affect recruitment?" This is not always easy to answer, but it is massively important and should elicit the movement's most serious evaluative thinking. Masks and anonymity are a net loss to movement numbers and should be generally rejected, in the view of this activist analyst.

Thursday, June 20, 2013

The Taliban is finally making another try at initiating
peace talks. Who is listening and who cares?

Afghans care. Their hearts are in pieces like the rubble
that is strewn wherever the US-led NATO/Karzai forces have bombed from the air,
or where the Taliban has crude-bombed, sometimes suicide-bombed, from the
ground.

The Bush-installed Karzai government cares—and they don’t
want it because the Taliban are sort of acting like a government-in-exile, replete
with a new
office in Doha, Qatar that sported a Taliban flag and a plaque identifying
the building as the offices of the “Political Office of the Islamic Emirate of
Afghanistan.” Whoops. Hamid Karzai wants it clear that these are just ragtag
insurgents, not a government-in-exile. But both sides have a point. Karzai
holds that, unlike the Taliban, his government is elected. The Taliban, who did indeed take
power by military force—although the origin stories of the Taliban tell of
liberation and defense of the vulnerable, making them popular in the
early-to-mid 1990s and made recruiting easy for them, paving their way to power—ruled
Afghanistan from 1996 until ousted by the US invasion in 2001 (and were heavily
supported during their formation and rule by the Pakistani Inter-Services
Intelligence, who were massively supported by the US), so in their eyes they
are the government-in-exile. They see Karzai as the puppet government of the
occupying military.

Underlying these deep differences are the age-old problems
of the conflict industry, that is, those who benefit financially, politically,
or militarily by the continuation of the war and so work to sabotage peace
efforts. Those parties may be visible or shadowy and they may proclaim public
support for peace or peace talks, but their actual work is to undermine any
real peace. They are the war contractors, the business owners both in
Afghanistan and elsewhere who profit handsomely from the ongoing war, the
military leaders from all sides, and the politicians who stand to lose
everything if peace breaks out. Indeed, says a Pakistani source who told
Reuters on condition of anonymity, “there were many likely spoilers in the
peace process who would want to maintain the status quo to continue to benefit
from the war economy and the present chaotic conditions.”

How can we who live in a democracy help in a situation like
this?

First, tell our President and our Secretary of State and our
elected representatives that we expect the US to stick to the military exit
plan, to accelerate it if possible, and to bring home or destroy all US
military weapons and munitions as we leave. The US should ban itself from
selling or giving any weapons to any party in the region. That is a proven losing
strategy, again and again. It was a loser when we gave tons of weapons to the
mujahedeen in the 1980s—weapons that then became the arsenals of the fighting
Islamic forces that either launched the September 11 attacks or harbored those
who did. It’s called blowback and it works well for US war profiteers. Ending
their profit-taking is perhaps the most important peace step the American
people can achieve by themselves, without the involvement of any foreign
government. As long as American war corporations are allowed to sell their
warmaking arsenals and ammunition either to the Pentagon to give away to
Central Asian governments or to any of those governments (or any parties who
trade with those governments and who can act as transshipment brokers), we are
enabling the conflict industry that is killing innocent Afghans and enraging
the survivors and crippling any efforts toward peace.

We, the American people, can take decisive steps to give
Afghans more hope than they’ve had since 1979 if we outlaw the sale of the
goods of war to the region, withdraw our own troops and weaponry, and convert
funds that our Congress was going to take from the US taxpayers for making war
and spend them instead on some combination of desperately needed humanitarian
aid, US war-debt reduction, US domestic expenses (education, environmental
protection, and US infrastructure maintenance—all of which create far more jobs
than the weapons industry ever did).

In short, what is good for peace for the people of
Afghanistan is good for the well being of all Americans except for the
extremely wealthy war profiteers. It’s time for them to stop controlling us.

Wednesday, June 12, 2013

My great-uncle was an accountant who responded to my father’s
question about how to best figure taxes, “I go to the line that says ‘Amount Owed’
and I write ‘0’ and figure backwards.” Hmmm. We might not think much of his
humor, but creating the future we want is no joke. His method might be helpful
in some crucial ways.

Those who study strategic planning sometimes explore
envisioning work, which is a bit like my great-uncle’s tax method, but with
practical advantages. First, imagine the future you desire in, say, 20 years.
Then work backward in logical increments (OK, if we want to see this happen by
2033, we need to at least have this precursor in place by 2028…If we want to
see that reality by 2028, we need to have achieved this by 2023…Since we want
to have this by 2023 we must have this other condition established by 2018…OK, how
do we get that done in five years?).

This is how we will best move from our hyperconsumption,
wildly overpopulating, extractive and wasteful polluting present to a
sustainable future. It has distinct advantages over extrapolative planning that
is solely based on where we’ve been, say Dublin’s Trinity College sustainability
experts Anna R. Davies, Ruth Doyle and
Jessica Pape. Writing in the journal Area,
they explain the immediate uses of those processes in Irish homes attempting
sustainable practices. Freeing up their minds by speculating on how they will
have achieved all this by 2050, the researchers found that participants
generally achieved “imaginative co-creation of knowledge” (p. 57). Working in
groups of seven, they went in their minds to 2050 and envisioned their society
running in a sustainable manner that satisfied their needs, almost always
involving novel solutions emerging from liberated imaginations freed of current
path dependency, and then worked backward and, along the way, joined their
desired future with the bogged-down present. They had created a line of sight
to a better future.

Peace researcher and sociologist Elise Boulding heard about
the very earliest such work and created a process, Inventing a World Without
Weapons, in the late 1970s. Her work made a slight impression then but was not
so much utilized; it is possible that its time has come now in our new
millennium of more arms, more weapons, but fewer wars. Indeed, the most
egregious arms—nuclear weapons—created such a dire nightmarish vision of an
apocalyptic future that humankind has, so far, not shot them at each other
since the first two were used to slaughter so many civilians in Hiroshima and
Nagasaki in 1945. Our imaginations have frightened us away from that dystopic
disaster, but can we put our imaginations to a stronger process of imaging and
then reifying a world without any war at all?

Our great grandchildren are depending on us to make that
world possible for them. Let’s go to the line that reads “Numbers of wars
fought in 2033” and imagine “Zero.” Once we’ve imagined it, we can create it. It
will take all of us. Let's figure back and then go forward.

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About Me

I am an old peace and justice activist from the 60s who just never stopped. At some point, when I was a community organizer working for Waging Peace in northern Wisconsin, I realized I needed a lot more education and theory to become a better activist. I picked up a few degrees and now I teach it. I've written a few books and spent time in many jails and three prisons for my nonviolent actions and see no reason to stop in our era of cascading problems from the war system.